Exhibition “8th Kilometre”

The exhibition “8th Kilometre”, which premiered in the Pavilion of Serbia at the 17th International Exhibition of Architecture in Venice this year, can be visited by local audience in the Museum of Yugoslavia. The authors are architects gathered around the “Modern in Belgrade” platform.

The idea to present the exhibition “8^th Kilometre” at the Museum of Yugoslavia came from the desire to make the work that successfully represented Serbia at the Venice Biennale available to the local audience. This exhibition about the mining town of Bor is in direct connection with one of the five industrial sites represented at the recently opened exhibition “On Factories and Workers”, which deals with industrial heritage in Serbia.

“In everyday speech, the inhabitants of Bor express individual places of the city through the measure of their distance from the surface mine Bor, which they mark as a starting point – ‘zero kilometre’ or ‘end of the world’. The system of orientation of the inhabitants is analogous to the way of planning and building the city itself through the seven kilometres of the city. In that sense, the “8th Kilometre” represents a qualitatively new layer of the city and suggests the directions of its future development independently of the mining industry “, the authors of the exhibition point out and add:

“The exhibition shows how, on the example of the Bor basin, the developed mining production has so far been unequivocally set as the exclusive factor of the city’s existence. By integrating this production into global capital flows, the city manifests its lack of opportunities to work on the social and spatial level. At the same time, due to the unsustainability of the proposed alternatives to the socio-economic development of Bor, this is an opportunity to redefine the life-work relationship, and thus the physical framework within which these processes take place. Therefore, the exhibition and the research consider the future of this relationship through the theme of the “8th kilometre”, which introduces a disturbance in the order of the existing seven urban zones – seven urban kilometres. Each of the seven kilometres was researched through the study of archival material and through a project of a topic that is specific to a certain area, that is, a kilometre of the city. The relevant topics are, in the sequential order: industry, spatial planning, cultural spaces, housing standard, culture of everyday life, ecology, and demography”.

The platform Modern in Belgrade (MuBGD) includes: Iva Bekić, Petar Cigić, Dalia Dukanac, Stefan Đorđević, Irena Gajić, Mirjana Ješić, Hristina Stojanović and Snežana Zlatković, and the collaborators at the exhibition were: Katarina Đorđević, Stefan Đorđević and Dragan Stojmenović.

The exhibition “8th Kilometre” is open in the May 25 Museum building, within the complex of the Museum of Yugoslavia, until February 15, 2022.

About “Modern in Belgrade” platform

The platform was founded in Belgrade in 2018 and brings together a group of architects with special interest and commitment to the field of illustration, graphic design and fine arts. Together they have launched the MuBGD project in order to promote, but also critically analyse the architectural heritage of Belgrade through innovative graphic representations. The authors’ long-lasting research in the field of visual representation aims to contribute to the understanding of canonical architectural projects and objects and their roles in the wider socio-political, economic and cultural context, as a critical instrument for observation, reflection and behaviour in contemporary space. They have realized several exhibitions (during 2019) for which they were awarded the “Ranko Radović” Award (2020) in the category of television shows, exhibitions and multimedia presentations. The project “8^th Kilometre” was awarded the MicroMacro Award at the STRAND Design Awards 2021 in the category of Challenges in Architecture and Urban Design.